ABSTRACT

‘European thought, European commerce, and European enterprise, although actually gaining in force ... will nevertheless relatively sink in importance in the future, while the Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands, and adjacent territories will become the chief theater of human events and activities in the world’s great hereafter’ so uttered William Seward, the architect of America’s initial Pacific expansion (quoted in Korhonen, 1996). Seward, Secretary of State to Abraham Lincoln, perceived the Asia-Pacific as the Republic’s historic ‘prize’, an ‘empire of the seas’ (Lafeber, 1993, p.9). Manifestations of Seward’s vision are detectable in today’s foreign policy rhetoric and the shifting priorities of successive post-Cold War US administrations. As Madeline Albright, the first woman to be appointed Secretary of State, has declared, ‘America is, and will remain, an Asia-Pacific power’(Albright, 1997).